Alias the Lone Wolf eBook

“My God!” the mutter protested. “Do
you know what that means? No lights at night,
under way, in main-travelled waters! Why, by nightfall
we ought to be off Block Island, in traffic as heavy
as on Fifth Avenue! No: that’s too
much.”

“Too bad,” Lanyard uttered, philosophic.
“And the thing could have been done.”

“Isn’t there some other way?”

“Not with lights to hamper my operations.
But if some temporary accident were to put the dynamoes
out of commission—­figure to yourself what
would happen.”

“There’d be hell to pay.”

“Ah! but what else?”

“The engines would have to be slowed down so
as to give no more than steerage-way until oil lamps
could be substituted for the binnacle, masthead, and
side-lights, also for the engine room.”

“And there would be excitement and confusion,
eh? Everybody would make for the deck, even the
captain would leave his cabin unguarded long enough...”

“I get you”—­with a sigh.
“It’s wrong, all wrong, but—­well,
I suppose it’s got to be done.”

Lanyard treated himself to a smile of triumph, there
in the darkness.

XXVI

THE BINNACLE

It would have been ungrateful (Lanyard reflected over
his breakfast) to complain of a life so replete with
experiences of piquant contrast.

It happened to one to lie for hours in a cubicle of
blinding night, hearkening to a voice like that of
some nightmare weirdly become articulate, a ghostly
mutter that rose and fell and droned, broken by sighs,
grunts, stifled oaths, mean chuckles, with intervals
of husky whispering and lapses filled with a noise
of wheezing respiration, all wheedling and cajoling,
lying, intimating and evading, complaining, snarling,
rambling, threatening, protesting, promising, and in
the end proposing an unholy compact for treachery
and evil-doing—­a voice that might have
issued out of some damned soul escaped for a little
space of time from the Pits of Torment, so utterly
inhuman it sounded, so completely discarnate and divorced
from all relationship to any mortal personality that
even that reek of whiskey in the air, even that one
contact with a hard, hot hand, could not make it seem
real.

And then it ceased and was no more but as a thing
of dream that had passed. And one came awake
to a light and wholesome world furnished with such
solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot
and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left
one’s stateroom to see, at the breakfast table,
leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous
lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled
white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark;
who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting
a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic,
looked up with lacklustre gaze, gave a surly nod, and
mumbled the customary matutinal greeting: